I thought about making one of these. Was going to use a BLI PA and BLI centipede for the turbine unit with lots of machining plus not to forget it needs to been stretched. The drive trucks are sort of close but need work. I have a few extra big boy tenders I purchased 20 years ago. What worries me is the poor running of both sets of centipedes I have. One set has been back four times, yes 4 and it still sucks. they other set has good days and bad, like stuttering around the layout. Ironiclly they run just a well as the full size ones did, pennsy crews hated them. After all the money I dumped into them , well, I almost hate them too.

The Centipede would be a viable option, as the wheel arrangement is the same as the GN's W1. The trucks probably aren't the same, but it would be much closer than anything else available.

Is the poor running due to the motor, or poor pickup? If the latter, you might find they'll work as turbines. Wire all three together, and the PA and tender should be enough to keep the Centipede alive.

I liked my centipedes, but, the one thing that I hated about the "smart" decoder was that when it hit a dead spot, it stopped the whole thing while it re-set. It used to re-set, then start to run, again, but, this was annoying. I do not use DCC. Mine ran well, unless they broke contact.

I did talk to several DCC haters who took out the whole business then re-wired. This eliminated the stop-while-re-set problem, but, it also eliminated the sound, which, I must admit, I liked, at least on the centipedes, I did. I was on the brink of removing the decoders, though, when I decided that I was trying to do too much with too many railroads on an average sized layout, so I sold off all of my Penn power, cabooses and passenger cars (except for a few baggage cars).

Other than the stop-while-re-setting, I did have a problem with one of the units (I bought one single with the antenna and one without). It came with one of the solder joints undone at the truck. As I am clumsy with a soldering iron near plastic, I sent it back (BLI did give me "permission" to address the problem, myself, but, I am clumsy with a soldering iron near plastic). They did fix it, but, they took their sweet time about it. When I finally did get it back, it was allright, except, of course, for the previously mentioned stall-while-re-setting problem.

As I was running these on DC, I do not know that "keep-alive" would work. One other thing for DC users to note on these is that you could not run them in pairs, as Penn did, as your power supply does not put out enough voltage to run two of these with decoders. You can run them in pairs if you take out the decoder, but, if you do that, you lose the sound.